tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post5314861875107550943..comments2016-12-09T17:12:45.472-05:00Comments on In the Middle: Time is the Question of the Subject Seized by His or Her Other: The Intensities of an Ardor of a Different Kind in Dinshaw’s Queer HistorisicmJeffrey Cohenhttps://plus.google.com/110433684739546897626noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-6797887682705318982008-08-15T10:38:00.000-04:002008-08-15T10:38:00.000-04:00Nicola: my only real response to your last comment...Nicola: my only real response to your last comment here would likely be to repeat much of what you said in different words, so I won't. You've pretty much captured something that matters a great deal to me, which has to do with recognizing, as you put it, the hopelessness of the question yet nevertheless beginning to act *as if* there were one [but without worrying how that will be judged]. I hope I got that right--in precise, as it were. Thanks to your suggestion to the read the book, I myself have become enamored of Gumbrecht's book "Production of Presence" [I also recommended it to Dinshaw because I think it provides some really constructive modes of thought for answering the questions she raises and leaves hanging in the air a bit in her essay "Temporalities," and I don't think we should forger either how influential Gumbrecht's thought has been on Cary Howie's and vice versa], and I am especially drawn to thinking more about the ways in which Gumbrecht asks us to cultivate new modes of what I would call en-worldment, and this project [Gumbrecht's] has real affinities with the political theorist Jane Bennett's in her book "The Enchantment of Modern Life," all of which bears upon your thinking here [I think] about us [I take it, as scholars] taking more seriously our work as the "making" of presence(s). There has to be room to experiment, of course. We have to think about access, too, of course: *who* can do this and in what circumstances? After so many conversations with my friend Michael Moore, who is also a medievalist, over the issue of personal freedom and also amity [two subjects that Michael seems to labor over most assiduously, with me as the voice always asking, "what's so special and privileged about personal freedom, personal freedom to do what, personal freedom for who at who's expense, etc."? which is partly the result of the profound influence on me at one point in my life of having read Simone Weil's "Draft of a Statement of Human Obligations"--i.e., obligations versus "rights"], I *do* find myself coming around to the value and importance of personal freedom [how significant it is for each individual, how conducive to happiness, etc.] but from the route of wanting to labor to create spaces within which the greatest amount of freedom can be garnered for the greatest number of persons/entities--this project has something to do with what Ivan Illich called maximizing the personal energies under personal control. Any scholarly *experiment* that would tilt at this would be worthwhile in my mind.Eileen Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-74365397789283769372008-08-14T16:30:00.000-04:002008-08-14T16:30:00.000-04:00How do we do it?Eileen, thanks for asking, first o...<I>How do we do it</I>?<BR/><BR/>Eileen, thanks for asking, first of all because the never-ending beginning of the answer is to keep asking, functionally and abstractly (the way one asks of a map not just where is x? but how do I get there from here?) this question, as part and parcel of living, say, philosophically or in wonder, living within the labor of asking-answering, with and on all levels of one's being What Am I Doing Here?, each word of which echoes with millenia of discourse and pondering of impossibles. Putting aside the large sack of the obvious and necessary caveats and qualfications--that there is not *an* answer, but as many answers as askers; that it is a hopeless question, which wants more than answering it can provide; that for many people it is a useless and unnecessary question, one that many can 'do perfectly well' without (and that is fine)--I will try to say something helpful.<BR/><BR/>This passage from _Fear and Trembling_ comes to mind:<BR/><BR/>"How does the single individual reassure himself that he is legitimate? It is a simple matter to level all existence to the idea of the state or the idea of society. If this is done, it is also simple to mediate, for one never comes to the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, something I can also express symbolically in a statement by Pythagoras to the effect that the odd number is more perfect that the even number. If occasionally there is any response at all these days with regard to the paradox, it is likely to be: One judges by the result. . . . When in our age we hear these words: It will be judged by the result--then we know at once with whom we have the honor of speaking. Those who talk in this way are a numerous type whom I shall designate under the common name of assistant professors. With security in life, they live in their thoughts: they have a <I>permanent</I> position and a <I>secure</I> future in a well-organized state. They have hundreds, yes, even thousands of years between them and the earthquakes of existence; they are no afraid that such things can be repeated for then what would the police and the newspapers say? Their life task is to judge the great men, judge them according to the result. Such behavior towards greatness betrays a strange mixture of arrogance and wretchedness--arrogance because they feel called to pass judgment, wretchedness because they feel that their lives are in no way allied with the lives of the great. Anyone with even a smattering <I>erectioris ingenii</I> [of nobility of nature] never becomes an utterly cold and clammy worm, and when he approaches greatness, he is never devoid of the thought that since the creation of the world it has been customary for the result to come last and that if one is truly going to learn something from greatness one must be particularly aware of the beginning. [Here the <A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8v31WWEO1Y" REL="nofollow">opening</A> and <A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYKzIMyXzpU" REL="nofollow">early scene</A> of David Lynch's Dune echoes in the background] If the one who is to act wants to judge himself by the result, he will never begin. Although the result may give joy to the entire world, it cannot help the hero, for he would not know the result until the whole thing was over, and he would not become a hero by that but by making a beginning" (Hong trans., p. 62-3). <BR/><BR/>So, one does it by *beginning*. Cf. Arendt on action and natality, which is another way of understanding authentic action (as opposed to mere behaviour) as action within the *full situation* of life, of one's and the other's life, the action of mortals, the action of persons for whom life itself is something at stake, not just a set of stable, predictable (consumerist) practices, not just a state in either sense. But this is too abstract. What I want to do (and see intellectuals, humanists, medievalists, whatever do more of and more creatively) is try to take seriously, understand, tinker with, and invent their own practices as poetry in the old sense, as making, production, art. Cf Gumbrecht's call for production of presence. This means being a go-between, an amis, for poetry and philosophy, so they can get back in bed together and make beautiful babies, not just bastard 'experimental' babies, though those are cute too, and this means killing criticism, or gently laying its already dead body to rest, since <BR/><BR/>"Criticism is born at the moment when the scission [between poetry and philosophy] reaches its extreme point. It is situated where, in Western culture, the world comes unglued from itself; and it points, on the near or far side of that separation, toward a unitary status for the utterance. From the outside, this situation of criticism can be expressed in the formula according to which *it neither represents nor knows, but knows the representation*" (Agamben, Stanzas, my emph)<BR/><BR/>Which is very abstract, so I don't really have an answer, or don't yet know how to say the answer I have.Nicola Masciandarohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-25570506416708711182008-08-13T17:53:00.000-04:002008-08-13T17:53:00.000-04:00Nicola: sometime I think--this guy is crazy! But i...Nicola: sometime I think--this guy is crazy! But in a good way. Seriously. You call *me* a sprite? You're the sprite, dude. All kidding aside, and even though I wonder about *how* we could practice this more *practically*, I liked very much how you concluded your last comment:<BR/><BR/>"If this Now [Dinshaw's Now, as well as, I take it, her expansive inter-temporalities] really is all that it is cracked up to be then I want to jump into it as a portal to a new and unforseeble dimension, not just stand nearby and point to it as something interesting, not stay inside and talk about how it is raining but go get wet, not appropriate mystical time (Certeau) for the sake of criticism but live in the time where criticism, discourse, conversation is (already) mysticism, which as I understand it is nothing religious or faith-based but simply living in the most-actual dream that unbearable happiness, love, and the answer to everything, everything your heart desires, is totally available, right in front of our faces. So, poetic, poethical scholarship, wager, yes, and the more we risk the better for there is nothing to lose."<BR/><BR/>You hit at something important here regarding criticism and praxis [and by praxis I don't mean to reinscribe criticism *as* praxis or praxis *as* criticism--which is the typical copout, which even I myself am prone to]; but the more difficult question might be: how do we do it? How do we move through that portal? How do we start doing our work differently *enough* that the lines between criticism, conversation, maybe "party," affinity/amity, pleasure/delight, due diligence, ethical care, seriousness, experimentation, artistry, etc. really converge and produce a new space, not just for work, but for living? It would be worth trying, in any case.Eileen Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-89133307668258779942008-08-13T00:12:00.000-04:002008-08-13T00:12:00.000-04:00Great post, Eileen, and really interesting comment...Great post, Eileen, and really interesting comments to continue the conversation. Fascinating. <BR/><BR/>In his comment, Jeffrey brings up the <I>noli me tangere</I> - both in Margery and in the end of that chapter on her. I was wondering about that scene, Margery's pain at it, and other ways of thinking through that moment. <BR/><BR/>I think you're hitting something in where you say <BR/><BR/><I>One could even say that their “life projects” had, at a certain point, to be aborted [or quite literally came to a standstill as in, as Dinshaw details, the point at which Jesus’s noli me tangere puts a kind of halt to Margery’s desire to have a bodily relationship with him], and the work of an affective scholarship such as Dinshaw’s labors mightily to reclaim these voices, bodies, and projects [or to at least register the palpable potentialities broken off “in the middle,” as it were, and maybe even to reactivate these potentialities in the present as what Benjamin would have called “chips of Messianic time”]. And through the process of writing itself, Dinshaw also attempts to “touch” these particles, let’s say, of human abjection across time—this is a deeply humanist project</I><BR/><BR/>I'd add to that and say that maybe a moment like that, which effectively forces her to halt her "life project" is also a moment where scholarship might help illuminate something that <I>remains</I> from that life project, in the form of the text: A kind of desire in excess of that which is allowed, or allowable -- an excess registered, perhaps, in tears (Jeffrey, do you have something on this from MIM? I don't have it in NC). But moreover, that excess which makes these figures -- these bodies -- exceptional, in a very literal sense. I'm always reminded of another mystic when reading Margery -- Hadewijch of Brabant, whose visions are of Minne, and fulfillment therein. At one point in her visions she explains how she is better than the saints, precisely because her desire can be excessive, can exceed what God wants her to desire. She can want Him more than He wants her to. A Saint, by definition, would desire only as much as God wanted. Maybe a part of this kind of history is also to reclaim these desires -- maybe ultimately wanting more from history than scholarship can give, but opening to being touched by what can still be perceived, and perhaps, partially, remembered. Maybe to letting that excess spill out over centuries -- talking a self into existence.Mary Kate Hurleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14892991966276345782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-64844852476639047472008-08-12T13:15:00.000-04:002008-08-12T13:15:00.000-04:00Eileen:Wonderful. I think you are a sprite running...Eileen:<BR/><BR/>Wonderful. I think you are a sprite running ahead of me pointing out the wonders of the world and I've barely enough time to keep up! Will have to refresh myself with Marion on eros, which I've only barely touched and whom I'm also reading on unknowing for the Aesop paper.<BR/><BR/>Two thoughts. First, about solitude and time re: the Levinas passage, this makes me think of the *planetary* structure of time, of temporality as planetary solitude, or better, lonesomeness, the lonesomess of being in orbit around one's other and therefore of course wholly bound to/with it in the most intimate, gravitational way, bound, as we feel to be bound *by* time, in a motion that 'precedes' all other motions, so that time is something like the motion of motion, the same way Aristotle says thought is the thought of thought. Second, about CD and phenomenology, I am reminded of when I asked her, two Kalamazoos ago, whether she capitalized "n/Now" in her paper, and it turned out she did, but was not exactly sure why. I think this emblematizes a crux in the relation between literary/historical reading and philosophy and the place of phenomenology in that relation. Literary interpretation, producing textual meanings, is like phenomenology in the sense that both are places where we get to have, live in an/the enchanted cosmos without having to worry much about claims as to the precise nature of that enchantment, where we can remain in the passion of un/non-knowing (Augustine, Derrida, Caputo), in non-secrecy and the joy of actuality, of being with each other as real human beings, Kierkegaard's poor existing individuals. This is where we have Now without eternity, apophasis without God, etc., which is wonderful, playful, honest, creative, necessary and certainly of value. But I say go a step further, in the direction in which I wrote about "the facticity or actuality or <I>that</I> which is so wonderful/terrifying/beautiful that it might as well be called (and may very well be) God," which is a step past where the literary interpreter is supposed to speak from, literary meaning being conventionally and institutionally understood, in a kind of reverse cartesianism, to be some hallucinatory, floating phenomenon above the stable ground of historicity in the English sense (with due qualifications for agency of ideas, ideology, bla bla), the world of facts "we" inhabit, that makes "we" make sense. CD's Now breaks from this dualism of meaning and fact in the direction of phenomenology and existential philosophy. Cool. But I also remember wanting more from her capitalization and thinking that not having an answer for why one would capitalize it is weak and potentially cowardly. If this Now really is all that it is cracked up to be then I want to jump into it as a portal to a new and unforseeble dimension, not just stand nearby and point to it as something interesting, not stay inside and talk about how it is raining but go get wet, not appropriate mystical time (Certeau) for the sake of criticism but live in the time where criticism, discourse, conversation is (already) mysticism, which as I understand it is nothing religious or faith-based but simply living in the most-actual dream that unbearable happiness, love, and the answer to everything, everything your heart desires, is totally available, right in front of our faces. So, poetic, poethical scholarship, wager, yes, and the more we risk the better for there is nothing to lose.Nicola Masciandarohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-28375990539877215422008-08-12T11:25:00.000-04:002008-08-12T11:25:00.000-04:00Sarah: I utlimately agree with you that the practi...Sarah: I utlimately agree with you that the practice of history as "how it really was" and as process are so interrelated with each other that I don't think we could locate one book that isn't always doing both. One of my favorite books, actually, that foregrounds and even privileges what might be called "documentary" history while also foregrounding a new way of thinking about "doing history" [and is also "micro-history"], is Certeau's "The Possession at Loudon." And my favorite line is, "History is never sure."<BR/><BR/>Jeffrey: as to your being startled by Dinshaw's concluding line to chapter 3, addressed to those who "would eliminate us [queers]":<BR/><BR/>"don't touch me,"<BR/><BR/>I was startled, too, but I partly took that as a form of the "answering back" that Dinshaw was illustrating in Margery Kempe's life and also as a kind of political threat to the powers-that-be in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere regarding queer/human rights. Of course, it's paradoxical to much of what Dinshaw is advocating for in the book regarding affective touch as an historical method, and brings back the question of how touch can be too forceful, too appropriative, and violent. But we might also say that we can, and must have both: that we need to argue for and practice a form of life that is affective and in which touch can have moral and ethical agency, while at the same time realizing that there will always be those who will touch violently and who need to be answered "back," whose force might have to met with, at the very least, forceful talk. Does that make sense?Eileen Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-76438634655258578632008-08-12T10:59:00.000-04:002008-08-12T10:59:00.000-04:00Nicola: it's so weird that you brought in Levinas ...Nicola: it's so weird that you brought in Levinas again as I was composing that other comment and was also saying to myself, "and now I will return to this thread with Levinas's TIME AND THE OTHER." Because I think a lot of what Dinshaw is doing in "Getting Medieval," whether she says she is doing it or not, is really undergirded by certain phenomenological insights, especially those formulated by Levinas who, like Dinshaw, is an ethicist at bottom, top, first, last, and everything in between ["ethics as first philosophy," as Levinas said]. "Time and the Other" [which could almost be a sub-title for Dinshaw's book] is my favorite book of Levinas's, although I realize that: 1) it is not really a book but a collection of early lectures delivered at the College Philosophique in Paris in 1946-47, and 2) all of its ideas [which Levinas himself described as "prepatory" to later work] are reworked in the later magnum opuses "Totality and Infinity" and "Otherwise than Being." Nevertheless, the opening lines of the first lecture, in particular strikes me from these early lectures in relation to Dinshaw's work:<BR/><BR/>"The aim of these lectures is to show that time is not the achievement of an isolated and lone subject, but that it is the very relationship of the subject to the Other. This thesis is in no way sociological. It is not a matter of saying how time is chopped up and parceled out thanks to the notions we derive from society, how society allows us to make a representation of time. It is not a matter of our idea of time but time itself. To uphold this thesis it will be necessary, on the one hand, to deepen the notion of solitude and, on the other, to consider the opportunities that time offers to solitude."Eileen Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-72699319237944654632008-08-12T10:46:00.000-04:002008-08-12T10:46:00.000-04:00Nicola: I read your brief bit over at The Whim on ...Nicola: I read your brief bit over at The Whim on "Mysticism, Place, Chora, Body" and I especially love the idea of the body as "the most intimate wrestling partner through which and with whom we struggle to get a grip on ourselves, cast off sleep, determine the truth about things, find where here is." I think this resonates quite a bit, actually, with some of Dinshaw's thinking in her book, especially as regards the idea of place--the place of the body, and especially in relation to the place of other bodies (and especially bodies in other times). Because I know you are interested in and have written before about chora [as has Michael O'Rourke, as has Dan Remein], you might want to check out Bracha Ettinger's "The Matrixial Borderspace," which in a sense *does* gender the chora [although she herself does not directly address Derrida's or anyone else's thinking on chora, but it's there, implicitly--you might say she rejects the chora in favor of where we really came from: women's bodies].<BR/><BR/>I also am really intrigued by your thinking about philosophy beginning in the erotic [the question, I take it, as you put it, of the body and its initial question, "where am I?"] and then leaving the erotic to the side, which mysticism then takes back up through its primary mode of feeling: passion. For a book chapter I recently finished revising on Levinas, I read for the first time Simon Critchley's "The Ethics of Deconstruction" [which parses out whether or not Derrida's thought can be ethical--according to Critchley the answer is: only if we read Derrida and Levinas together] where he takes up, also, this issue of how philosophy often does not take as one of its concerns the homely bodily, but then again, doesn't phenomenology? Critchley describes phenomenology as "the description of things themselves as they are concretely experienced by us: the way these glasses feel on my nose, the touch of this table top under my fingertips, what I see when I take a walk in the park . . . what it feels like to be bored, or anxious or to laugh out loud" [p. 283]. Although he admits that not many philosophers take up these more homely matters as a subject for their philosophizing [he claims, conversely, that Levinas does].<BR/><BR/>But you also concentrate on the erotic, which is not necessarily always sexual, and *could* also be those things Critchley describes above--the bodily feel of things in the world as we experience them--although I think the erotic might more properly be the term we use for a particular orientation toward the world, a feeling within us that Freud defined as the libido, a life-force, or even a love-force, and as to whether or not philosophy ever takes this up as a primary concern--which is also to say, does it take up passion and passionate embodied feeling as a primary concern--we might say that some of the very first philosophy did--hence, Plato's "Symposium" [and think, also, later, of something like Castiglione's "Il Cortegiano"], but since then, love/passion *has* fallen out of favor in philosophy [or, post-Enlightenment, anyway, it could not be a concern and moved over into psychology and sociology, maybe even anthropology]. That is why, and I know I've mentioned this before, I think you would love the book "The Erotic Phenomenon" by Jean-Luc Marion [which Michael O'Rourke recommended to me a while back], the whole of which is concerned with what you seem to be concerned with in much of your own work and thought: being and nonbeing, the erotic, and love. Here is a passage from the first chapter:<BR/><BR/>"Between knowing and not knowing, no one hesitates to prefer knowing. But why? After all, the conquest of knowledge--or more modestly, of a body of knowledge--requires attention, labor, and time, to the point that one would often like, voluptuously, to do without it. But in fact, we do not do without it. . . . A first response suggests that we desire to know for the simple pleasure of knowing--perhaps the most exciting, the most durable, and the purest of the pleasures that it is possible for us to experience in this life. To the point that one could see in it the only possible natural beatitude, the rival of the other, unconditioned. But how do we fail to see that, in this case, we do not desire simply to in order to know, but in order to experience the pleasure of knowing--we know in order to enjoy knowledge, in order to enjoy the act of knowing, and thus, finally, to enjoy ourselves through the process of knowing. . . . Desire itself, more essential than the desire to know, springs forth--desire, which, even in knowledge, only desires self-enjoyment." [p. 11]<BR/><BR/>As regards space/place/location, Marion writes [and this, I think, is apropos to Dinshaw's touching across time, which is an erotic touch--not sexual necessarily, but passionate and animated by the life/love force]:<BR/><BR/>"The erotic . . . renders destitute the homogeneity of space. According to the natural attitude (and thus, here, metaphysics) space is defined as the order of compossibles, of all the beings that can exist together and at the same time, without rendering each other mutually impossible. Whence its homogeneity, which is noted through the first property of beings in space: they can--by right, if not always in fact (but the problem is only that of the power of technological means)--move about, pass from one place to another, and exchange their positions. Every *here* can become an *over there*, and every *over there* can once again become a *here*. Spatial beings are thus characterized by the paradoxical property of not holding to any proper place, or of not having an fixed home. One constantly replacing the other, they ceaselessly circulate within an indifferent space." [p. 29--I would argue with Marion's idea of "an indifferent space" but let's leave that for a moment]<BR/><BR/>The erotic renders this conventional or metaphysical view of space "destitute" because although I may change my geographical location and even the social and technological networks within which I "move" [if I have the power to do so], the question, "am I loved?" or "does anyone love me?" [questions which Marion concedes are, at bottom, vain, yet necessary, more necessary than thinking, per se--Marion's philosophy replaces the cogitant with the lover], space becomes heterogeneous:<BR/><BR/>"all the *over theres* can no longer be exchanged for so many *heres*; a place becomes for me unsubstitutable for the first time, fixed and natural, if you like--not the *here* wherein, like a subsistent being in the world, I find myself, and which does not cease to be displaced, but the precise *over there* stuck in me, where I receive the elsewhere, that is to say, the *over there* from whence I receive finding myself riveted into myself, the elsewhere itself. Thus I do not live where I am, *here*, but rather there whence there comes over me the elsewhere that alone concerns me, and without which nothing, of the beings of the world, would concern me." [pp. 31-32]<BR/><BR/>Marion refers to this as an erotic *reduction* of space, actually, although I think we could conceptualize it, through a body [as Dinshaw describes] that is open to temporal multiplicities, as also an expansion of space which, nevertheless, by virtue of the singular object ultimately fastened upon [Margery Kempe, for example] is still reductive.<BR/><BR/>While I understand that some will find some of these passages from Marion a bit baffling [and they are taken out of the context of a much longer work], I am just struck immediately by how Marion's idea of finding oneself, *here*, riveted in oneself, through the erotic reduction, by the elsewhere [which is the hope, or the somewhere, of being loved] has such resonances with Dinshaw's queer historicism. Or so I think this morning, after only one cup of coffee.Eileen Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-13265898477659042392008-08-12T09:47:00.000-04:002008-08-12T09:47:00.000-04:00For comparison with Certeau on the mystic's time a...For comparison with Certeau on the mystic's time as question: <BR/><BR/>"Time is not the limitation of being but its relation to infinity. Death is not annihilation but the question that is necessary for this relationship with infinity, or time, to be produced” (Emmanual Levinas, God, Death, and Time, 19).Nicola Masciandarohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-56367615445274182152008-08-11T16:33:00.000-04:002008-08-11T16:33:00.000-04:00It is difficult to do anything in the face of such...It is difficult to do anything in the face of such a post other than to mouth assent. I've read and then reread it over the course of the day, hoping to find an entrance for conversation, but it has such a beautiful sense of boundedness, of completeness. It doesn't need me.<BR/><BR/>Thanks for foregrounding temporality and affect so well ... and for the sadness in CD that becomes so clear when Spencer Reese is placed next to or even touches her.<BR/><BR/>My question is oblique to your project, and has to do with community and the noli me tangere of Jesus, the words that leave Margery reeling. <BR/><BR/>The most puzzling moment of GM is for me just after the Kempe chapter has taken its long political swerve, into the controversy over government funding of the NEA. CD writes:<BR/><BR/><EM>And in defense of our united (but not necessarily unified) interests as queers, as medievalists, as proponents of queer scholarship, as humanities researchers, as advocates of higher education, and as supporters of academic freedom, we say to those who would eliminate us:</EM> Don't touch me.<BR/><BR/>Even after all this time that last imperative startles me, because I must admit that I have always expected something rather different to follow the eloquent injunction other than a boundary drawing differentiation (the entire book has been an argument against boundaries). Why this limit, why the noli me tangere? Why not something like <EM>You have already been touched</EM>?Jeffrey J. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-48573744808333774592008-08-11T06:36:00.000-04:002008-08-11T06:36:00.000-04:00A substantial (I hope) comment later, but for the ...A substantial (I hope) comment later, but for the time being the post arrived as this CFP for Leeds 2009 did. We talk so much about texts here at ITM that it's good to be reminded that our colleagues in art history are thinking along intersecting lines:<BR/><BR/>Postcolonial theory and medieval art: heretical approaches to an orthodox discipline<BR/>Organizers: Eva Frojmovic and Catherine E. Karkov<BR/><BR/>One of the topics discussed at the 2008 IMC roundtable on postcolonial theory and medieval art was the continued dominance of orthodox constructions of disciplinarity, periodization and methodology in the study of medieval art. Medieval art, especially early medieval art, remains a passive other in terms of its chronological boundaries, its subject matter, and its continued reliance on iconographic and stylistic study. This session seeks papers that use postcolonial theory to intervene in our construction of the medieval past and our understanding of medieval images. We welcome papers that focus on particular case studies, as well as papers that interrogate aspects of the discipline.<BR/><BR/>Professor Catherine Karkov<BR/>Postgraduate Tutor<BR/>School of Fine Art, Art History and Cultural Studies<BR/>Old Mining Building<BR/>University of Leeds<BR/>Leeds LS2 9JTJeffrey J. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-46259509408238225262008-08-11T03:30:00.000-04:002008-08-11T03:30:00.000-04:00What a great post, Eileen. I really like the idea ...What a great post, Eileen. <BR/>I really like the idea of a 'poetics of historiography'. <BR/><BR/>I have not read Dinshaw - I have skimmed parts of it - and like the ways in which she embraces the complexities of History and historiography - plus she starts with quotes from Nietzsche and Bloch which take us well beyond Ranke...<BR/><BR/>So - a post like this makes me sorry not to be joining in the book club, but I am busy in other ways and going on holiday soon. I hope that I will return to read this (and perhaps GM) properly another day.<BR/><BR/>I think we need both kinds of history - history as process and poetry as well as history 'wie est gewesen war' - indeed I am not sure that I can see how you could have one without the other.Sarah Rees Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07540329925016517409noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-68846632101987682282008-08-11T01:18:00.000-04:002008-08-11T01:18:00.000-04:00But can it be advanced, if even tentatively, that ...<I>But can it be advanced, if even tentatively, that Dinshaw labors, as does Reece, at a sort of spiritual discipline?</I><BR/><BR/>Certainly, as it always already is, whether thought as such or not.<BR/><BR/>Yet how much depends, thrives upon, for good and bad, the maintenance and regulation of the *gap* that making this advancement would close! But there seems to be such clear desire in the air (cf. the place of the present panel) for what I called <A HREF="http://medievalclubofnewyork.blogspot.com/2008/05/heart-and-head-at-kalamazoo-or.html" REL="nofollow">Sufistic Medieval Studies</A>, for a *way* of closing the critical circle and practicing scholarship/discourse in a manner and of a kind that seeks to realize its end in its act, that knows itself as a discipline (and thus also joy) in this full sense. Cf. "every authentic poetic project is directed toward knowledge, just as every authentic act of philosophy is always directed toward joy" (Agamben, Stanzas). To which the only possible, real answer one can give is DO IT.<BR/><BR/>But maybe I can say what I do not want this desire and the advancing of it as such to be. I do not want it to be just another desire of desire, another gesture pretending to be an act, another 'call.' Nor do I want it to be a desire for a particular definable thing, so that anyone can say, yes, this is what we want, this is what we should do. <BR/><BR/>Two passages come to mind, sort of corollaries to each other, on the necessity for a and the nonexistence of the way.<BR/><BR/>"In contrast with the world of facts man builds out of his inspired imagination another world of ideals. Sometimes he imaginatively transports himself into the world of ideals; sometimes he reverts to his realistic world of facts; and occasionally he tries to bridge the gulf between them by actually and laboriously traversing the path with slow and bleeding steps. The temptation to seize the ideal imaginatively and pose as having realized it is so irresistible that there are very few who do not succumb to it" (Meher Baba, Beams, 50-1).<BR/><BR/>"By many a trail and manner I came to my truth; not on one ladder did I climb to my height, where my eye roams out into my distance. And I never liked asking the way -- that always offended my taste! I preferred to quesion and try the ways myself. All my coming and going was a trying and a questioning -- and truly, one must also *learn* to answer such questioning! That, however -- is my taste: -- not good, not bad, but *my* taste, of which I am no longer shameful nor secretive. 'This--it turns out--is *my* way--where is yours?' -- That is how I answered those who asked me 'the way.' *The* way after all -- it does not exist!" (Nietzsche, TSZ).<BR/><BR/>But maybe this doesn't speak directly enough to your post, which has most helpfully convinced me I need to really read GM before blabbing about the scholar's body. And I do feel a lot of continuity with what you'er saying and something I wrote for the Eros as Cosmic Sorrow Paper about <A HREF="http://thewhim.blogspot.com/2008/08/mysticism-place-chora.html" REL="nofollow">Mysticism, Place, Chora, Body"</A><BR/><BR/>NicolaNicola Masciandarohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.com